


Anywhere, just not here

by nereidee (aurasama)



Series: Frictional October 2018 challenge [9]
Category: Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-04 03:18:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16338821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurasama/pseuds/nereidee
Summary: Some decades after being exiled on earth, Alexander has tasted the bitterness of mortality and begins to fear that his ageing body will run out of time before he finds a way home. Pre-game.Written for the Frictional October challenge on Tumblr, based on the prompt 'machine'.





	Anywhere, just not here

Alexander coughs, the acrid, bitter smoke making his throat sting and his eyes water, and he pauses, just for a moment, to rub his eyes until the feeling eases.  
  
“Blasted thing keeps breaking,” he mutters. He ignores his aching back as he bends over the machine, lantern at hand, trying to locate the issue. Time is running out, he knows; he tires so easily nowadays.  
  
He has seen it in the mirror, the rapid, unrelenting ageing of the body he inhabits, much faster than he thought possible, and no matter how he tries to ignore it, he knows there is no winning against time. He had believed, once upon a time truly believed, that his stay in this world would be short-lived, and now fifty odd winters have settled deep into his bones.  
  
Fifty winters. Seasons turn and no matter what he tries to build, all of his efforts seem fated to crumble into the ashes of this cursed, primitive world.  
  
Alexander straightens and groans quietly as a spike of pain shoots up his spine. Everything is breaking. His crude machines, his experiments, even this body. His eyes fall on his hands, grease-stained and thin. How bony his fingers have grown, how weak his arms. With each passing season he seems to find more limitations, more obstacles, while his possibilities dwindle into nothing. His eyes water again and he wipes the tears away angrily.  
  
If crying helped, he wouldn't even be here any more.  
  
The lantern gives off its soft light as he hangs it from a hook and sits down, letting his eyes slip closed. Every morning he wakes up more exhausted than the night before, with a new ache somewhere that wasn't there earlier. When this body grows too old, too broken, then what? Will he one morning simply not wake up any more?  
  
This world ruins everything, he thinks. Everything. Even him. He had been prepared to wait through all the ages of the world if only it meant he could go home, no matter how long it took, but he doesn't have an eternity, nothing in this world has. Everything here starts collapsing and decaying before he has turned around twice, every little life so temporary, so frail, so meaningless. It's nothing to build a future on.  


He gets up and gives the machine a kick. It sputters into life, groaning and clanking, and he guesses it won't be long until it breaks down again. Everything he does, Alexander knows, seems to be marching towards the same end, and he's only delaying the inevitable, but the gods be damned if he won't fight it to his last breath.  
  
But if he's to die, he wishes it would be anywhere else. Anywhere but here, in this dying world.

**Author's Note:**

> This is set sometime during the first half of the 1600s, much before the prison was built and Alexander had started harvesting vitae.


End file.
